Introduction to Mourid Barghouti's Poetry

INTRODUCTION

BRINK-MAN: MOURID BARGHOUTI AT MIDNIGHT

Guy Mannes-Abbott, London 2008

I’ve heard Mourid read his poetry many times since it

began to appear in English. He reads without introduction

or quip and the work is received in stunned silence.

Audiences realise they’re hearing work of lasting rarity on

first encounter. Work that wrestles with the particular and

universal in unique ways. The poems have an openness

which encloses great depths, their lines draw landscapes in

your palm, catch the skin with universal truths.

Barghouti is also the author of a classic memoir of exile, I

Saw Ramallah, in which he describes writing itself as a

displacement. As this doubly-displaced writer, he had

published five collections of poetry by his mid-30s. The fifth,

Poems of the Pavement published in 1980, marked an

important shift.

“This is the real start of my voice,” he once told me,

before explaining the context with figurative argumentation.

“So, okay: you occupy the autostrat with your poetry, your

bombastic tone, but give me the pavement! Poems of the

pavement? I am not in the mainstream – I need the pavement.

You take the street – you’ve already taken it, it isn’t mine.

I’ll be confined to this. I’m happy with this” – happy enough

to produce six further poetry collections, a 700-page Collected

Works, a memoir and the book-length poem ‘Midnight’, first

published just after his sixtieth birthday in 2005.

The selection of shorter poems in this volume, like a

further precious pocketful that exist in English, are highly

distinctive and peculiarly consistent. I don’t read Arabic and

so once asked if I could judge his work from them. He told

me: “They are representative of my experience since 1980.

This is typical of the way that I write; the form changes, but

the economic language, the density of the poems, the

importance of the trivial, small things, simple vocabulary,

the slowness of perceptions. I don’t give signals directly; this

is characteristic. I’ll give you an example: the poems translated

here were written in 1978, published in 1980 and I’m reading

them today – with my latest poems from ‘Midnight’.”

“I gather flowers on the brink of subsistence,” wrote

Walter Benjamin from Ibiza in 1933. It was the beginning

of years he spent as a refugee which ended on the Spanish

border in 1940, when he took his own life rather than be

returned to occupied France. This image of gathering flowers

on this particular kind of brink illustrates Mourid Barghouti

and his work perfectly.

“From the summer of 1967, I became that displaced

stranger whom I had always thought was someone else,” he

has written. This stranger “lives essentially in that hidden,

silent spot within himself. He is careful of his mystery” and

no longer possesses a place. Barghouti’s indirect, yet

profoundly exact, poetry articulates this mysterious quiet.

It’s poetry from after the nakba, the ‘catastrophe’ of 1948

when the vast majority of Palestinians were driven from

homes and land, and ancestral villages were erased.

“I live in a time, in the components of my psyche, in a

sensitivity that is special to me” he continued; “the one

whose will is broken lives in his own internal rhythm.” These

rhythms are the flowers recovered by the brink-man.

One of the first things Mourid Barghouti said to me about

his work was that he uses very simple, everyday things in his

poems; a table, a chair.

“I write in concrete, physical language. The words

translate easily,” he said on the first of my many strolls with

him. “My translators told me they are the same in each

language. This is why it works.” While this is true in itself,

it’s only part of the story.

At a later meeting, talking through cigarette smoke in a

noisy hotel bar, he knocked on the table between us: “This

is poetry. Language is here – in the street, in the mud, in the

shop, in the kitchen, in the market, the discussions, in

everyday life. And you can make poetry out of this.”

Barghouti was born in 1944 in a village called Deir

Ghassanah, near Ramallah on the West Bank of the river

Jordan in Palestine. It’s one of a cluster of villages called

Bani Zaid, home to the prominent Barghouti clan. The

Barghoutis are political figures, landowners and poets, as well

as villagers. Despite the Barghoutis’ perceived status, Mourid

eagerly traces his name to the word for ‘flea’ in Arabic.

Mourid the Flea, the second of four brothers, moved with

his family to Ramallah during his school years before enrolling

in the University of Cairo in 1963. He is, he says, “four years

older than the State of Israel” which, finally and fully,

rendered him and most of his family stateless only in 1967,

when it occupied parts of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. “Every

Palestinian who was outside his village or place, for tourism,

for education, for medication, for any reason, was considered

as Not-Palestinian” and forbidden to return.

Since 1967, Mourid, al-Barghouti, has been forced from

temporary homes in various countries. Stranded for many

years in Budapest, he was finally allowed home to Cairo,

and his small family, in 1995, and home to Deir Ghassanah

in 1996. Beyond that “for twenty years I was not able to go

back to Jordan, for seventeen years I was not able to go

back to Cairo and, after the Israelis invaded Lebanon in

1982, until 2004, I was not able to go back to Lebanon.”

Today, in 2008, Mourid Barghouti, the Palestinian,

remains stateless. It’s this knowledge that adds depth to the

poem, in some ways his most accessible work, he’s read

everywhere I’ve heard him read. It’s a poem written from

the pavement and several degrees of exile, called ‘Desire’:

His leather belt

hangs on the wall,

the pair of shoes he left behind has turned brittle,

his white summer shirts

still sleep on their shelf,

his scattered papers

tell her that he will be gone a long time

but she is there still waiting

and his leather belt

is still hanging there

and each time the day ends

she reaches out to touch a naked waist

and leans back against the wall.

In his acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize in 1987,

J. M. Coetzee described the literature of South Africa in the

apartheid years, including his own, as a “literature in

bondage… unnaturally preoccupied with power and the

torsions of power, unable to move from elementary relations

of contestation, domination and subjugation to the vast and

complex human world that lies beyond them.” It is an art

“entrapped by finitudes”, in terrible contrast to the unbound13

ed invention of a Don Quixote.

In I Saw Ramallah, Barghouti writes that “displacements

are always multiple” meaning that, once uprooted, there is

no return.

“Writing is a displacement, a displacement from the

normal social contract. A displacement from the habitual,

the pattern, and the ready form. A displacement from the

common roads of love and the common roads of enmity. A

displacement from the believing nature of the political party.

A displacement from the idea of unconditional support. The

poet strives to escape from the dominant, used language, to

a language that speaks itself for the first time. He strives to

escape from the chains of the tribe, from its approvals and

its taboos. If he succeeds in escaping and becomes free, he

becomes a stranger at the same time. It is as though the poet

is a stranger in the same degree as he is free.”

This is one reason why Coetzee’s notion of a literature in

bondage is a limited one. Others are evident in the sublimely

brilliant writing of the first chapter, ‘The Bridge’ of Barghouti’s

memoir. He crosses the wooden bridge over the river

Jordan in a multiple of guises: “A visitor? A refugee? A citizen?

A guest? I do not know.” It’s a multiplication, a fracturing, a

brilliantly angular, as well as creakily located crossing, return,

arrival and approach “towards the land of the poem”.

He continues; “People like direct poetry only in times of

injustice, times of communal silence. Times when they are

unable to speak or act. Poetry that whispers and suggests

can only be felt by free men.”

Mourid Barghouti’s time is defined by a unique injustice,

yet he writes poetry of near-silent suggestiveness with all

the potency of a freedom to come.

‘Midnight’ is a poem about a man in a room with an

open window through which visions, stories and memories

pour in, refusing him any rest. It’s not just any midnight

either, but the very cusp of New Year. It’s also not an English

midnight. In Arabic, Mourid tells me, the word means ‘halfnight’

– a mixture of day and night – a more pregnantly

ambiguous notion than that of a pivot or starting point.

Published in Arabic as the year 2004 turned to 2005, a little

over half appeared in English a year later.

Rooms with windows like this recur in I Saw Ramallah.

On his long awaited ‘return’ to Ramallah, Barghouti stays

in the home of a family friend. His room has a window that

opens onto the familiar sight of olive groves not seen for

exactly thirty years and an alien Israeli settlement on top of

the hill. An insistent rush of memories and questions deprive

him of sleep on his last night there.

Mourid frequently resorts to metaphorical windows to

describe his work and, more importantly, how he intends it

to work.

“I don’t ask you to feel this way or that way, or to direct

the emotions of the reader. I just open a window” – he wafts

his hand; “this is the scene. Look at it… okay, have a nice

time, I leave you.” His hand sits up pertly.

This manoeuvre of selective offering is crucial. It relates

to an extraordinary precision in his poetry, the light touch

of capturing things in a glance or snapshot. It also rehearses

the singularity of his faith in the concrete. In his memoir

Mourid writes that he only became a poet when he discovered

how “faded all abstracts and absolutes were… when I

discovered the justice and genius of the language of the

camera, which presents its view in an amazing whisper,

however noisy this view was in fact or in history.” He’s

describing the way that the Occupation was “changing us

from children of Palestine to children of the idea of Palestine.”

Barghouti’s is a poetry of refusal and resistance as well as of

pregnant ambiguity.

In ‘The Pillow’, from The Logic of Beings, Barghouti takes

an object that is easily ignored but intimately present in all

our lives and gets it to talk. It tells us truths that only it can

know about “the grandeur of unnoticed little things / …

the loser’s dignity, / the winner’s loneliness / and the stupid

coldness one feels / when a wish has been granted.”

Mourid talked to me about the Iraqi poet, Badr Shakir

al-Sayyab, whose work he came across in a beloved bookstore

in Ramallah as a boy. “I have loved poetry since I was very

young but had never associated myself or found any of the

poems in the school curriculum directly relevant to me. Then

I came across this book and felt: ‘this is a person with whom

I can associate’ – not only because of the form but because

there was no literary diction in his poetry. He was a normal

person trying to say something about this life in which we

are living. And I started to imitate him in my first collection

or two, which is natural.”

Al-Sayyab is credited with being the first of the

modernists in Arabic poetry, writing throughout a short life

which ended in 1964 when he was 38 .

Barghouti’s first collection, The Deluge and the Recreation,

was published in Beirut in 1972, as he and his wife Radwa

Ashour (now novelist and Professor of Literature) were on

their way to settle in Cairo after a short period in Kuwait

with Mourid’s uncle. In the early 1970s, as a poet and radio

journalist in a milieu of artists and intellectuals, he became

increasingly engaged. With the Arab world in disarray,

President Sadat stamped on dissent in Egypt while moving

towards a unilateral ‘peace’ with Israel. Mourid, and many

others, could never accept his attitude to a blatantly unjust

status quo. No doubt he said as much on Radio Palestine.

No doubt this, and paranoid notions about opposition, led

to the first closure of the Voice of Palestine in 1975.

He and his colleagues settled in Beirut, then a city of

dissidents and ‘rogue poets’ in the midst of civil war, and reestablished

the radio station. For several crucial months they

remained hemmed into a downtown area under constant

bombardment before being invited back to Cairo by Sadat.

On 17 November 1977, with his son Tamim only five

months old, he was arrested and deported. Sadat was about

to give a speech in Jerusalem which recognised Israel’s newlyestablished

‘facts on the ground’. This gesture of ‘peace’

brought a longed-for embrace from America and jettisoned

the Palestinians to Menachem Begin’s ‘Iron Fist’ policy of

ongoing Occupation. Mourid was deported to the only Arab

country that would take Palestinians without a visa: Iraq.

He escaped to Beirut but found himself so isolated there

that he had to accept an exile in Budapest.

It’s from these years, places and experiences that his real

voice, the dissident ‘pavement’ voice, emerges. The titles of

[as yet] untranslated collections tell their own story. After

the grandiose ‘opener’, The Deluge and the Recreation, came

A Palestinian Under the Sun in 1974, the title of which refers

to a famous novel by Ghassan Kanafani, a Palestinian writer,

friend and inspiration who was assassinated in Beirut in 1972.

In 1977 came A Song to Armed Poverty, and a year later

Earth Reveals Its Secrets, a more characteristic expression. By

1980, when Poems of the Pavement appeared in Beirut,

Mourid was long gone, distanced by several degrees of exile

in Budapest.

“I’ve seen war when it is… silly,” he laughs and continues

slowly and thoughtfully. “I saw causes being manipulated…

I saw rhetoric substituting for language and communication…

I saw false heroism…. I saw the bodyguard become as

important as the person he guards. I wrote a poem called

‘The Bodyguards’ describing them as kings – it was smuggled

all over the place.”

It is Mourid’s distaste for hollow heroics, along with the

songs and poems to endless ‘victories’ of this period, that

forged his unique voice, founded as it is on a refusal to

simplify anything, founded upon an elemental dissidence –

temperamental and aesthetic – and informed by his sense

that, in all of this, “the step toward my country” never arrives.

This is what he means when he describes himself as being

positioned against, or at an angle to, the mainstream, the

autostrat, filled with “the stars of the street”. In marked

contrast, Barghouti seeks a poetic language that “defies the

fake and flamboyant. I am trying to defy the conventional

language by which this unconventional world is described.”

Silence.

Silence said:

truth needs no eloquence.

After the death of the horseman,

the homeward-bound horse

says everything

without saying anything.

“When I went to Budapest it took me seven years to

produce a book, because I could not become reconciled to

the move.”

This book is called Endless Estrangement and nothing from

it is translated.

After this in 1992 or 1993 came Rannat al Ebrah – “ebrah

means ‘needle’, rannat means ‘ringing’: ‘the ringing of the

needle’. My poetry had reached a point that is almost silence,

by which I mean I had reached an economy inside the poem,

using the minimum of what we might call linguistic

‘weapons’. Closer to silence, it’s Rannat al Ebrah.”

Frequently I hear Mourid asked to repeat how he ended

up where and when, and in particular how he found his

way to Budapest. In his memoir he wrote: “I hate a fraudulent

yearning…” and he could not be more honourably precise

about his own exile, in relation to others, minimising its

specialness, constantly guarding against exception, refusing

presumptuous pleading.

So he abbreviates responses, skipping parts to get the

answer out. It is as if, in their sympathy, no-one realises that

it’s a map scorched with pain, as if they have not pondered

the absence of advertisement. Yet the world has barely

noticed the facts of this uniquely chronic dispossession, so

he has to respond; it is a duty to tell. Each time, the rate of

compression is slightly different. Often I hear interruptions

for more detail. It remains a confusing story.

It took many hours over some days before I asked about

Budapest directly, forcing him to revisit real desolation. It is

in Budapest, though, that a newly-refined voice develops,

consolidates and, though close to silence, is practised and

heard. I asked if he’d been sent directly there, which led

him to explain, with faltering reluctance, the story of

deportation to Baghdad and being returned to Beirut.

“Then there was a real problem. I was on the left of my

leadership, radically against the Arab regimes when Arafat’s

policy was to be on good terms with all the Arab regimes.”

He slowly describes the consequences of this isolation, trying,

as ever, to explain fully, to prepare me rather than engage

my sympathy – knowing how bizarre it must sound decades

later. It is a bald restatement of the refugee’s senseless estate.

Eventually, Mourid describes meeting an old friend in the

street who, seeing his desperation, suggests the sanctuary of

a modest posting in Budapest.

“With the negligence of my situation, I welcomed the

idea. I was fed up with being in the same place as the entire

Palestinian leadership, the whole lot of them. Wherever they

were, I got away. When they went to Tunis after the

invasion – when Sharon entered Lebanon – I refused to

enter Tunis!”

This is the only moment when his voice strikes a false

note, one tinged with bravado.

Again there is a long pause.

“I don’t know. I’m a critical person, my vision is a critical

vision – towards everything. It’s difficult for me to be told

how to think, what to do, who to help. I can’t work to that.

I’m really an independent person. This is an observation, not

…”.

He tails off again, the memory clearly unpleasant. In fact

he seems actually disturbed by revisiting it. This is particularly

striking to me, a witness to his extraordinary implacability

elsewhere, to his allergy to expressions of sympathy or alarm

at new injustices. It’s a story of destitution, a complete

abandonment, an unromantic solitude. I recall a line in his

memoir: “the wish to count the faults of the victim has

woken in me once again… we too have our faults.”

This is the “story of accepting Budapest” where he was

to become a member of the Bureau of the World Federation

of Democratic Youth, and where he worked as a kind of

cultural attaché with PLO representatives. It was 1977-1978,

ten years after the apparently endlessly repeating defeat of 1967.

I was the one who changed the subject.

Mourid was forced to spend a decade and a half in

Budapest, “leaping through the ages toward particulars: /

the address of a house, a roof… / a friend’s knock at the

door”. Finally, in 1996, he stood “on the dust of this land”

on the far side of the bridge, able to write “my country carries

me.” As he crosses, assaulted by memories of those funerals

he could not attend, those friends murdered in exile, of large

and small memories, his head full of song, the scene is

“as prosaic as a bill of reckoning.

The wooden planks creak beneath my feet.”

He’s carrying a manuscript which is to become The Logic

of Beings – poems from this and another collection called A

Mad Night are scattered through I Saw Ramallah. The Logic

of Beings was published from Amman, where his mother lives

and where he met with Radwa and Tamim during the

summers of his peculiar exile. He describes the poems in

Logic as haikus, in which he tries to make inanimate objects

speak. It’s an extension of the creaking wood underneath

the chorus of resistance songs, it’s the dust of reality that life

propels him towards. It’s something else too: the most singular

quality of this Palestinian poet.

“I once said that a poet should have some hot water and

liquid soap and a sponge to wash words like we do greasy

dishes. So I would like every abstract noun to be broken

down into what it means in concrete terms in the real world.

The freshness of a word does not come from its being poetic,

it comes from being precise. We have to be precise. Creative

writing is a critical process.”

This dirty, dusty, applied work of intervention,

engagement and poetry-making labour has a clear

inspiration. In contrast with the men – “Arab leaders, tribal

‘kings’, rhetorical revolutionaries, ‘victorious’ freedom

fighters, ‘poets of the revolution’, the proclaimers of Arab

‘Unity’”, he celebrates the constancy and sheer day-to-day

industry of the women – “our mothers”. Women, mothers,

like his own mother Sakina – heroine of the memoir – who

stayed, continued, created and sustained life: “a revolution

realised every day, without fuss and without theorising.”

Mourid describes to me an untranslated poem, also called

‘Rannat al Ebrah’, in which he uses “the real needle, as the

women are embroidering the Palestinian peasant’s dress.

Every Palestinian women wears a dress that is embroidered,

here and in the arms, right to the bottom. It’s all

embroidered, it’s very expensive, but – I mean – they do it.

So in order to praise the role of women in the successive

intifadas, I just wrote about this dress. How, under the very

soft light of a traditional lamp, step by step, night after night,

women are doing something, something which is finished

beautifully. And in the poem, I said that I would be led by

this needle and the direction it chooses towards beauty.”

He pauses to relish the thought, his head buried in the

memory.

“So give me orders, you are the guide, you are the signal…”

This is the revolution of the everyday, an enduring handmade

resistance which sounds exactly like his notion of the

work involved in poetry. It’s the same applied effort and it

disallows abstract, rhetorical calls, easily turned phrases or

crude nomination.

Mourid has a voice carved from stone. Deep, definite, it

moves forward with sparing certainty. It is the perfect voice

for his poems, albeit one partly formed by chain smoking. It

also suits his handsome dignity, his survivor’s durability and

purposive calm as well as his lewd chuckle, occasional blunt

language, and obvious enjoyment of laughter. He uses it to

inveigh against lazy adjectives and everyday imagery which

– he laughs heartily – “fall into your cup of coffee” like flies.

Form, however, is crucial to him: “Form is not chains

because the freedom of a writer – as I see it – is his or her

freedom to choose their own chains. They create chains of

their making and they abide by them, but they do not obey

borrowed chains.”

Barghouti’s chosen formal restrictions, together with this

refusal to drink the fly-strewn coffee, link to idealist notions

of a work of art being an “isolated, self-contained work” – to

quote a young Walter Benjamin. This is also what is conjured

up by the brink-man’s flowers; they represent this kind of

recovery of difficult precision from an impoverishment in

our requirements of language. It is both a rescuing of the

difficult and the difficulty of such a rescue.

These are the responses to Coetzee’s problem and

Barghouti exceeds it in two ways. In some ways the choice

of chains is the most radical in Mourid’s case, a simple refusal

of the prison-writing that Coetzee fears. Then, there’s a

perfect example of what I mean, on a small scale, in a poem

which exemplifies Barghouti’s refusal to nominate, to wave

banners, to confine the particular within its particularity.

It’s the longish poem ‘A Night Unlike Others’ [see p. 196]

published in 2002, but written, I suspect, in late 2000 or

early 2001.

Poetry, Giorgio Agamben argues, is defined by “the

possibility of enjambement… the opposition of a metrical

limit to a syntactical limit. […] Enjambement reveals a

mismatch, a disconnection… such that poetry lives, only in

their inner disagreement.” Poetry’s open-endedness – “this

sublime hesitation between meaning and sound” – is its core.

Anything else is prose.

‘A Night Like Others’ is poetry of this kind. Knowing

more, adding explicatory prose, only reveals the precision

of its work as poetry. So, what ‘more’ can we know from the

poem as it presents itself to us? We know more from knowing

its date, more if we focus on the two flags, though every

nation has a frontier and every one has been, or is, contested.

We know more if we take up, with care, the words schoolbag,

bullet holes and shelling. We know something by the

word Mohammed, though it’s important to understand

exactly what. However, despite being the most declamatory

of Barghouti’s poems in translation, there is no accusation

or nomination, nothing that must be withdrawn under

certain circumstances, no contentiousness nor, even here,

any stage directions. Its author guarantees no tears for his

poem.

Yet this is a poem written in the wake of the deliberate

shooting of Mohammed al-Durra, who cowered in terror

with his father under Israeli attack, an attack captured on

film that went global in September 2000. Statistically

common as an event, this was, in fact, a rare recording of

the gratuitous killing of a child by Israeli Defence Forces. A

war crime right in front of all our faces. Then Israel reinvaded

illegally occupied territories as the second intifada

took off. Mohammed al-Durra became an icon of injustice,

a symbol, an idea, wrapped in flourishes of rhetoric – the

kind that Mourid refuses.

I asked him about it, knowing that there had been a

memorial edition of an occasional publication in Cairo,

renamed Durra, to which writers – including Mourid –

contributed. Something touched him about my question,

perhaps the fact that I asked it, or that my overdue son was

born just after it happened. The point, quickly established,

was that yes, it was Mohammed al-Durra in one sense, but

in another “Mohammed is not a name, even!”

There are many Mohammeds, I suggest.

“Yes.”

He then described his participation in a kind of memorial

tour of north African capitals with the father of this particular

Mohammed, whose long face we all saw yanked into animal

terror. There were posters everywhere, he said everyone was

saying this, chanting that. “Okay, I went on the tour, but I

never read this poem!”

He said this with pride, proud of a characteristic,

principled clarity.

So we have a poem about a grotesque crime, which was

a trigger for the slide back into hell for Palestinians: a

historically significant moment. The poem does not name,

nor does it blame. Even agreeing to a memorial tour in

support of the family, the poem that does not name is not

read! This, in a heightened way, exemplifies Mourid

Barghouti’s work.

Here he has chosen his chains, even if the walls of the

prison remain misty.

The truth, or a truth: this event is self-contained and

incontestable.

The particular here, unnamed, has graduated to the

universal.

If this is literature in bondage, the bindings are our little

humanity, the prison our planetary bauble.

Paul Celan wrote despite an internal injunction against

poetry after the shoah [the catastrophe of the European

Jewish genocide]. His poems broke down the language of a

world that had become unrepresentable. Inverted images of

the world become the only means of rendering such a state

of being. He once wrote of “Spring, when birds fly up to

meet their tree”, a line whose levity, economy and selfcontainment

tells us everything. It’s a line I’d often thought

that Mourid Barghouti might have written and, in

‘Midnight’, he has.

‘Midnight’ was written between January 2002 and July

2004 as a cumulative series of segments and angular portraits

of a man whose prison walls talk. The poem is the product

of a world gone mad, thrown headlong into a nightmare of

mythological barbarity. Nothing is as it should be, or even

as it appears, any more. For Palestinians, the early 1990

agreements in Oslo offered limited hopes but contained

explicit commitments to them. By the millennium,

settlements on the occupied ‘West Bank’ had flourished,

every promise was broken and their own leadership fatally

compromised. Used to chronic injustice, and having survived

acute injustices, Palestinians were now thrown into another

round of both contiguously, crimes against humanity of an

unimaginable order.

Against all of this, Mourid insists upon an instinctive

capacity for joy, but the poem makes for bleak and distressing

reading. Mourid may have chosen the chains, but at times

you feel the man is trapped forever in a uniquely relentless

hell. Certainly this is poetry of human extremity, the world’s

madness concentrated in the Palestinians existential

torment, further gathered into the ferocious gusts of unending

nocturnal distress. A day like no other in human history,

just another day in an endless night. Mourid told me that

“the disappointment is endless now. No promises – promises

of independence, freedom, movement, autonomy, way of

life, sovereignty – they are all destroyed.”

In ‘Midnight’, the narrator asks: “Why is it that whenever

I see a man who has been murdered / I mistake him for a

person lost in thought?” We see “embroidered dresses /

stooping over gravestones.” Here Mourid writes of “hills that

follow each other like rhymes / hills that you shield, instead

of being shielded by them.” Here the difficult, necessary

flowers come from airborne trees. The world is upside down,

inside out, indifferent to a barely-conceivable injustice, the

endlessly repeated attempts to separate a land from its people.

If this is a literature of finitudes, of bondage, or of ‘prison27

writing’, then I embrace it along with Coetzee, Celan,

Benjamin – and Kafka too, of course. These poets of thwarted

humanity, who invent against all odds, equal – for me, surpass

– the freewheeling invention of Cervantes because they

represent the rarest, most vital pulses of our experience.

In fact, as I’ve argued, Barghouti’s poetry exceeds these

bonds in small, subtle, significant ways. Its judgements –

personal, artistic, political, ethical – involve an extraordinary

aesthetic precision. It’s all there in the work, a work of

unimpeachable creative responsibility and ethical clarity. Of

course, it is a writing ‘against’, but it’s also writing as play,

writing as human definition. This taut and often tortured

writing emerges from the deepest realms of our humanity. It

is a writing from many angles, directions and drives, and

delivers great depth.

In ‘Midnight’, Mourid Barghouti paints us the end of

the world. But there is a profound shift here too. He writes;

“I will not send a spaceship / to discover life on planet Mars.

/ I will try to discover life here / on this earth.” He draws the

poem to a close with a “message of doubt” for “the victorious”:

Enemies,

victory has become your daily routine

like your morning toast.

Why, then, this hysteria?

Why do I not see you dancing?

How much victory do you need to be victorious?

Every time I read those lines, I recall Mourid talking of

the hope he has encountered on the ‘West Bank’, the lessons

learnt from 1948, 1967, 1987 and 2000: “It’s really amazing,

little acts of resistance. They demolish the house, and they

cut down the trees and people stay where they are, in the

rubble! But in their place, a temporary house is raised, the

neighbours bring some help and family life is resumed in

some way or another.”

It would be wrong to describe ‘Midnight’ as a poem of

hope. It is not, not even hope against hope. Mourid gives

his narrator, whose life is one of obituaries and checkpoints,

the properly Shakespearian lines “Age: zero. / Life: tomorrow

/ and tomorrow and tomorrow!”

However, I see in this endlessly denied and deferred

existence potential for new life. Amidst desolation in the

shadows of stolen hills, there is a refusal of defeat and a

resistance to closure constitutive of poetry. ‘Midnight’ is also

a message of doubt to the victorious, something with

revolutionary – by which I mean real life, actual and historical

– potency. Mourid Barghouti’s poetry is a writing against all

conceivable odds: brinkmanship of the highest aesthetic

order.

Guy Mannes-Abbott, London 2008